May 20, 2009: Taken
I hadn’t necessarily planned to see Taken, but I liked the trailers, and as it turned out I ended up sitting and watching it. It’s bittersweet to see Liam Neeson hard at work on his craft here, not long before he lost his wife Nathasha Richardson to a skiing accident this past winter.
Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a CIA man, divorced with a remarried wife and a 17-year-old daughter. His daughter is kidnapped, apparently for a deliberate reason but he doesn’t know why. He does, however, vow to find his daughter and kill the men who took her. We eventually learn the reason for the kidnapping and some unfortunate details about ties to governments and the underworld of the immoral wealthy part of society.
Mills is surprisingly short-fused and violent, which I found to be far more believable than the usual sympathetic CIA characters we’ve seen portrayed before. To choose and excel in the in-the-field spy lifestyle would, I would think, require some sociopathic tendencies. Unfortunately this makes it less plausible that he would be so attached to his daughter, but it’s not overly far-fetched.
When watching movies alone, I don’t tend to notice or care about the rating, and the content which generates these ratings (sex, violence, smoking, drug use) tends to go unnoticed. I am, however, aware of the conventions which have developed over the years (for example, you can say “fuck” exactly once in a PG-13 movie, if you say it twice or more then you get the “R” rating and might as well say it 100 times). Since this is a movie with lots of shooting and other violence, I assumed it was R-rated, but then got to a scene in a brothel where someone was barging into rooms and the women with their clients were all more or less fully dressed, and that was an immediate trigger for me to check the rating, and it was indeed PG-13 (violence is OK but sex is a no-no, generally). Well, let me tell you, I have never seen this many people shot directly in the face (half a dozen?) in a PG-13 movie before, and Neeson ends up killing around 40 people in all. But there’s almost no blood seen, and that makes it all OK for the 13-year-olds. Incidentally, the seven-on-one scenes did start to get on my nerves a bit. Are thugs really that bad at fighting, and are steam pipes really always around when you need them, to rip off the wall (because they are of course installed with easy-break joints), blast a couple of guys in the face with the steam, slide your handcuffs from around the pipe, bash another couple of guys in the head with it, and then grab a gun (while still in handcuffs) and shoot the remaining three guys in the face? All I’m saying is that it strained credibility.
I had read a summary of Taken, saying that it was a great, tense action film except for the first 20 minutes and the last 10. I share a similar sentiment, although to be more precise I would cut the 5-minute action setup at the beginning, and the 1-minute coda at the end, which would make the film much more lean and focused. I’m glad I watched this, but you have to know what you’re getting into.
Mostly good, could be far better.
Post a Comment